QUESTIONS OF CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION

12741

CORRECTIONS AND ADDITIONS TO THE DRAFT DECREE OF THE COUNCIL OF PEOPLE'S COMMISSARS ON SCIENTIFIC LIBRARIES

[4 September 1919]

1) Establish precise accounting and oversight over all libraries left at the disposal of their former proprietors for satisfying their professional needs.

2) [Immediately] Requisition [them] and transfer into the use and disposition of the corresponding educational institutions all libraries for which protective certificates have been issued to their former proprietors, who in reality do not require these libraries for their professional occupations [including all libraries of former estate owners]. FOR THIS PURPOSE review the list of protective certificates.

3) Immediately requisition all libraries belonging to persons who have fled to the Crimea and to other localities situated on territory occupied by White Guards, or who have otherwise disappeared to unknown locations.

4) Eliminate, as a general rule, the former proprietors of these libraries from the management of libraries transferred into the disposition of the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment and made available for public use.

5) From all former private libraries made available for public use or left in temporary disposition of former proprietors, [extract] transfer all books representing great historical, scholarly and literary interest [and concentrate them] in special public book repositories [in the Rumiantsev or Historical Museums] (Rumiantsev, Historical Museum, etc.), as decided by the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment.

6) Review the instructions concerning the procedure of library requisition...

7) Charge the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment* with increasing the staffing and number of [librarians of public] [Soviet] state libraries.

*
Here Lenin omitted the words: "take measures." These words are given in the protocol. —Ed.